


Through the Grapevine

by schneestern



Category: Umbrella Academy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 21:28:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/schneestern/pseuds/schneestern
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's funny how rumors tend to appear around her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Grapevine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [harborshore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/harborshore/gifts).



> Thank you to my three lovely betas, who all helped me on such short notice.
> 
> WARNING: This story contains a major spoiler for _Umbrella Academy: Dallas_.

_Beginning_

"I heard a rumor that her own sister tried to cut her throat," one of the nurses says. She's a young thing, but there's a sharp twist to her nose that makes her look older than she really is.

"Don't be silly," the other nurse says, checking the IV. She's a little older. Her hair smells like fish. "It was that orchestra of crazy lunatics who tried to destroy the world and almost buried us all under chunks of the moon."

"But I'm telling you--" the other nurse begins again, but breaks off when the door opens. A surly doctor sticks his head in and gives them both a threatening look.

"Don't you two have other patients to treat?"

Both nurses immediately straighten up, faces going expressionless. They hurriedly gather up their things and slip out of the room under the watchful gaze of the doctor. The young nurse with the twisted nose chances a glance back to the bed before the door closes on the doctor putting a hand on her ass.

The door clicks shut quietly and Allison blinks, once, twice.

It's funny how rumors tend to appear around her.

Even if she's not the one telling them.  
   
_Stage 1_

"It's not going to be like that. I won't be his puppet," she spits. At nine she's already way too bitter for a girl her age.

Ben stands in front of her, the long corridor behind him stretching out towards the door at the end of it. The door. The one she's supposed to walk through, even though she knows what that means for her.

The Game Boy hangs limply in Ben's hand as he looks at her pleadingly. Ben always wants for them all to get along. He wants it more than anyone she knows, although Allison doesn't know a lot of people beyond her family and the milkman. It's foolish, because if Allison knew anything about probabilities she could tell him exactly how unlikely that would be.

"Please, don't be silly," Ben says. When he speaks, his soft voice always sounds like there's another layer to it, another person speaking in sync with him. It always unsettles her. "You know that you need the training or something like the Taiwanese cheesecake factory will happen again." The naked skin of his arm ripples a little like a pond that's been disturbed, then settles again.

"That wasn't my fault! How the hell was I supposed to know their special ingredient was cocaine?" Angrily, she reaches for her mask, trying to scratch the spot just underneath that she can never quite reach. The stupid thing always itches, always. She just wants to take it off.

"I know," Ben says and steps a little closer, "but still, practice is--"

"Ben!" They both look up, Ben half-turning. At the end of the corridor, silhouetted in sickly yellow light, is Sir Reginald, face barely visible. Allison can't quite make out the bed and monitors behind him, but she knows they're there.

"I told you to go to your room, didn't I, Ben?" Even from where he's standing, Sir Reginald's disapproving voice makes Ben flinch. This time his skin doesn't just ripple; a small tentacle morphs out of his shoulder, long with thin fur that's bristling. Allison takes a step to the side to avoid being touched by it.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I—I mean, Monocle, Sir." The tentacle furiously lashes out in mid-air, then curls in on itself and melts back into Ben's shoulder. Something in Allison's stomach rolls uncomfortably as she watches the smooth skin it disappears into.

"Allison, you're late. Hurry up and come in here. We have a lot to do today." With that, Hargreeves turns around and disappears back into the room, leaving the door wide open.

It's an order, not an invitation.

"If you do good, he'll give you ice cream," Ben whispers quietly, stuffing the Game Boy into his pocket. Allison gives him a hard look. They both know no one ever leaves that room with ice cream.

"I won't turn into one of his experiments, Ben. Never." She watches the way the hurt passes over his face and then gets swallowed by the ripples moving across his skin. She pushes past him towards the room.

Allison holds her chin high all the way into the yellow light.  
   
_Stage 2_  
   
She's standing in her kitchen, looking out the window into the night. Up at the moon. The front yard has been trimmed today; she baked a pie with Claire. She cleaned, went grocery shopping.

All day long the sharp pain has been there, still, right at the back of her mind. Stabbing. She'd thought it would go away.

For three years she's been thinking that.

"Who am I kidding?" she whispers and balls up the dish towel in her fist.

Because the thing is, it's not just a random pain. It's not a migraine, like Patrick said. It's a hot-orange pain that ebbs and flows inside of her mind like a pulsing open sore. She knows what it is, but she doesn't ever finish the thought. Allison left that life behind a long time ago. Patrick doesn't even know most of the things she did, the power she has. Thankfully, the media has a way of obstructing the extent of her abilities by talking about it in great detail.

Rumors hiding the truth. On some days she appreciates the irony.

"Hey, Allison, honey, are you dreaming again?" Patrick appears by her side and his blinding smile makes her eyes hurt. She clenches the towel in her hand harder, knuckles cracking.

"I'm fine," she says, not looking away from the moon outside, too scared to let Patrick see what she really wants to say.

_This was never who I was supposed to be._

"I'll take the pie inside and then we can have dessert, okay? Claire's getting sleepy already."

"Sure," she says and takes a deep breath, in, out.

"Maybe after that I'll go outside, get into my rocket ship and fly to the moon." Patrick's voice goes from pleasantly casual to icy cold in a split second.

"Excuse me?" Allison turns away from the window and looks at Patrick. She's surprised when she realises he's angry. Seriously angry in a way she's never seen him before.

The thing in her head buzzes and grows, hot and full of rage. Allison swallows and gives Patrick the best caring-wife-look she can muster, waiting for him to answer.

"Oh, let's not kid ourselves. You'd rather be," he sets the platter with the neatly cut pie pieces down on the table forcefully, "with the lovely uncle on the moon." His voice drips with venom and if Allison's head was clear like usual, she'd hear all the hurt in Patrick's voice and be touched by it.

But it's been too long. Hers isn't a power that's suppressed, it thirsts for usage, talking, words, that's what it needs.

She knows what she's going to say before she can even stop her mouth from opening.

"Well, I heard a rumor, darling," she says, voice way too loud to try and drown out the noise in her head, "I heard a rumor about you--"

"Mommy?"

It's a beautifully pristine moment of silence as she turns towards the door. Patrick's standing in front of her, face red with anger. He looks like he's working out the next arguments, insults maybe, to throw at her. And behind his shoulder, there in the doorway, is her little girl.

Allison tries, tries as hard as she never has before but it's too late. The rumor has manifested. It's impossible not to say it, not to carry it through. She tries to make it less harmful, less terrible.

"I heard a rumor that little girls like you are fast asleep in bed at this time."

She has said more terrible things in her lifetime, killed hundreds and thousands with just one rumor.

This is worse.

For one bewildered moment Claire looks curiously at her, yawning. Then there's a brief flicker of terror that lights up her whole face, like she doesn't understand what is happening to her. It disappears, her eyes going heavy. Claire turns around, slowly shuffles towards the stairs like she can't quite remember how to use her feet.  
Allison looks after her and suddenly the red heat in her head is gone, quiet, finally. She feels like she can't breathe right and when she reaches for something tickling her cheek, she realizes she's crying. Patrick makes a sound and it's only then that she remembers him again, seems to snap back into the moment. She looks up.

Patrick's staring at her, eyes wide and full of something -- wonder, maybe, or hatred or sadness.

And then he backs away.

Three weeks later she will tell a courtroom full of people: "I heard a rumor that we all think Patrick should have full custody of Claire."

For a long while after that Allison wishes her power would work on herself.  
   
_Stage 3_  
   
"So you ever tell yourself a rumor?" Klaus asks curiously and puffs out a huge cloud of smoke. He's recently taken up marijuana. Luther says he's going to be just another drug victim before he turns twenty-five. Right now, Allison could care less.

She smiles at Klaus and shakes her head, relighting her own joint. "Doesn't work."

"Sucks." Klaus shrugs and seems to lose interest. It's nice in a way. Hargreeves always looks at her as if she's a bug under a magnifying glass. Now that Vanya proved to be an utter failure, Allison feels a little more scrutinized, even though she can't quite put her finger on why.

Some days she thinks about making a break for it, like Vanya. Start a family, maybe with the guy training were-rabbits. Maybe not. A normal life with no powers, no missions, no death around every corner would be nice. Some nights when she can't sleep, rumors running off her lips like sheep jumping fences, she idly thinks about her dead Doppelganger, wondering what it would be like if she were still alive. She could live Allison's life, be the successful child Hargreeves always wanted.

"--and it didn't even hurt," Klaus finishes and holds up his bandaged hands. Allison shakes her head to clear it, but it doesn't work. She's pretty convinced Klaus is completely mad, but she envies his recklessness, his impulse to get the palms of his hands tattooed just because he can.

"What does it say on them?"

Klaus laughs and rolls his head to the side like it's made of jell-o. "I don't know. I told the girl to tattoo whatever she wanted."

Allison looks at him disbelievingly. Then she stubs out her joint and says, "Hey, guess what. I heard a rumor that your right hand says 'hello' and the left one 'goodbye'."

It's almost comical how wide Klaus's eyes go. Then his content smile comes back. He looks at his bandaged hands like he can see the new tattoos through all the gauze.

"I like it," he finally says. "Philosophical. Didn't know you had it in you, sis." The last word is sharp, meant to bring the insult of the sentence home. Allison feels nothing but calm, idly wondering if she should visit Ricardo and the rabbits.  
"You know, doing good things won't offset all the people you kill, right?" Klaus is still smiling when she looks at him sharply, but his eyes are serious. He looks like a tiger does, right before it pounces out of high grass.

"I never said I--"

"You're thinking it though," he easily speaks over her. "When you lie in your little bed at night, you think about fucking your boyfriend and you think, if only you save enough poor people you'll be redeemed. Just enough good rumors to offset the bad ones."

"Fuck you," she says, but Klaus doesn't even look at her, shrugs it off.

"It's every superhero's Achilles' heel. They think if they balance the bad out with the good, it'll all work out in the end. And that's crap." He stubs out the joint carefully and sticks the remaining bit behind his ear.

"Anyway, it's been nice talking to you, dear, but I better get going. I have a date with a prostitute who claims she's a tentacle monster from another planet. Intriguing for sure." Klaus gets up and stretches. On his shirt, the monkeys eating their bananas stretch too, grinning all the way. He pads past her, naked foot briefly brushing against her thigh.

"Later, Allison," he says and pats her head before he disappears out the door of Hargreeves's office, thick clouds of fume trailing behind him like an uncertain child.

Allison stays on the floor for a while longer, forcefully thinking about how wrong Klaus is.

It will take her a few years to realize that there's always a small bit of truth in the things he says. She never accepts that he might be right, though. You have to draw the line somewhere with the Séance.  
   
_Stage 4_

Allison doesn't know how they made it work without a hitch. One moment she's standing in a supply closet, the next moment she's being ushered towards the car by a hoard of secret service agents. She barely dares to look at the man next to her; his very presence seems foreign to her, like she's stepped into a photograph.

Number Five was right; this man is an idea, not a real person.

As she climbs into the car, mindful of her hat, she wonders how she got here. Well, she knows how she got here, but it feels like this is a moment. One of the moments where everything stops and then the world spins in the other direction. Allison's sure that if Hargreeves knew she'd be here, today, in this year, he'd be overjoyed.

She thinks about the little girl who watched the assassination on TV, overwhelmed and confused. "Why would someone do that?" she asked Luther later and he didn't have an answer, just like Pogo or Mother.

It's kind of funny in a way, because now that she's here with the weight of knowledge, responsibility and history behind her, she still doesn't know why. All she knows is that the lie that's going to smoothly slip over her tongue next will close a door for her, a part she's been fighting years to keep alive in that dark abyss they used to call home.

For a while she thinks of Luther as she waves to the crowd and smiles. It's mostly an old image, grainy and faded. Space on the moon, a newspaper snapshot of him. He's standing in the middle of nothing, body awkwardly bent. He doesn't know how to work the machinery smoothly yet.

What Allison remembers is the look in his eyes. He stares past the camera to a point slightly above it and there's so much longing there, big wide eyes that are the most human part about him now. Luther is staring at earth and Allison knows that he's looking for something. Someone.

And she's about to kill that person forever by opening her mouth, doing what she does best. By eliminating an idea bigger than herself

"Mr. President..." Her voice sounds so much surer than she feels, velvety soft and deeper than usual. Kennedy turns toward her and smiles at her gently. Allison knows the love in his eyes isn't for her, but she hopes the woman lying unconscious in an alley behind the hospital knows that it was there in the last moment. Hopes she will know somehow.

"I heard a rumor that the back of your head is about to explode."

The result is instantaneous and she doesn't have to feign the shock. It's only later that she thinks of the part she lost.

That last little bit of hope.  
   
_Stage 5_

Her arm is bleeding hard. Allison can't tell if he cut it off completely or if it's just a deep wound. It doesn't matter. She concentrates on the warm wetness that coats her skin. Some part of her helpfully registers that she's in shock, but really that's no surprise when one's the prisoner of a psychopath.

It's the gag in her mouth that's oddly comfortable in all of this. Her blood's pooling on the floor, she feels faint. Terminal keeps talking and talking, but it's his touch, it's when he suddenly appears behind her chair that gets to her. She tries not to let it show, to be as impenetrable as the mask she's wearing. Allison knows she's crying anyway.

But the gag, the gag that was supposed to keep her quiet is what she's holding onto. It makes her peaceful in a way. She can feel the words itching to get out but they can't, they're blocked. She's always been struggling to control them, to use just the right words at just the right time. Right now they might help her, but it also means that right now she doesn't have to control it at all, because there's nothing she can do, say.

It's the eye of the storm, even though she's too scared to realize it.

She's almost passed out from the blood loss and the struggle to stay brave when the wall explodes and Number One breaks through, fierce as ever and leading the way. Allison barely hears him call her name.

She bites harder into the gag and tries to reign in the words whirling around in her mind.

When Luther takes the gag out of her mouth, she tells her first perfect rumor.

"I heard a rumor, Terminal. I heard that your flesh will rot from your bones over the course of the next ten minutes. Imagine that."  
_End_

The door clicks shut quietly and Allison blinks, once, twice. It's dark but the room is still the same one they lived in when they were children. Half lab, half teenaged room with a TV by the wall.

Vanya turns her head slightly to look at her.

Allison hesitates, opens her mouth to speak but then thinks better of it and quickly crosses the room before she can change her mind. When she lies down in the bed, Vanya feels cold but she gives against Allison's touch. It's almost too natural, like they've always been sisters, when in fact they barely know one another.

For a while they lie there like that. Allison waits for her racing thoughts to slow down, waits for the assassination to fit into reality like this moment here with Vanya. Neither of them quite do.

Eventually, she opens her mouth to speak again, scar on her throat itching ever so slightly. She doesn't know what she's going to say, but when the words slip past her lips, a faint smile tugs at the corner of her mouth.

"Hey, Vanya, I heard a rumor--"


End file.
